


Redemption Suite

by tactfulGnostalgic



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Academy Era, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Multi, No Incest, Sibling Bonding, Vanya Remembers AU, but given that it's a stupid ass decision i have elected to ignore it, i acknowledge that the writers have made a decision
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-15 05:03:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18067103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tactfulGnostalgic/pseuds/tactfulGnostalgic
Summary: “Dad told you not to talk to me,” says Vanya.“Dad is a dick,” says Klaus. “Wanna go break his stuff?”—An AU where Allison is a better sister, the Hargreeves children act more like siblings, and they (inadvertently) prevent the end of the world.





	1. Thunder Song

**Author's Note:**

> A little bit of timeline rearrangement going on here: per the show’s casting, Allison “rumors” Vanya at age four or five, but in this AU, Reginald separated Vanya from the kids at five and only resorted to using Allison’s powers at thirteen. Vanya still has her powers suppressed, but she's not mind-wiped.
> 
> Also, since the kids were born in late 1989, that means their teenage years (and this fic) take place between 2002 and 2010.

Allison Hargreeves is thirteen years old and pretty sure she’s just done something unforgivable.

She doesn’t know how she knows this. It’s complicated because the bad thing she did was something her dad asked her to do, and he said it was for everyone’s safety, as a superhero it’s her job to keep everyone safe. And Dad never asked her to do bad things before. So when she came downstairs and saw Vanya locked in a cage, she assumed that it was just — part of her job.

And it was fine. She did what she was told. She did it and did it without question, and when she was finished, her father turned to her on the elevator ride back up to the main house and gave her one of his ghostly almost-smiles, and told her she had done well. And oh, Allison had _glowed_. She had felt lighter than helium. She had gone about the rest of her day with a skip in her step and a silly grin on her face, because Dad was proud of her, and Dad was never proud of anybody, but he was of Allison today.

But sleeplessness is one of the most common symptoms of guilt, and at half past midnight she still hasn’t managed so much as a light doze since their ten o’clock bedtime.

She rolls over in bed, blows out a frustrated breath. It’s not fair. It’s not fair at all that the one time Dad needs her, really needs her and is proud of her and trusts her to do something important all by herself, it’s something awful.

When she closes her eyes, she’s staring at Vanya’s pale, tear-stained face pressed against the glass door of her cage, begging with ragged desperation.

_ I heard a rumor you think you’re just ordinary. _

Allison has often thought, privately of course, that she’s the most powerful member of the group. Maybe save Vanya (although not anymore). Luther can hurl a truck one-handed and Diego can hit a bull’s eye two blocks over and Ben can do whatever godforsaken thing it is that Ben does, but Allison can bend all of them to her will with only a whisper. She can shift reality to meet her needs. She can twist the way someone’s mind works. She can dig out secrets, bury ideas deep in long-term memory reserves, and never leave so much as a trace behind her.

Sometimes she catches her father staring at her while she’s on a mission, and she thinks she reads terror in his eyes.

But that was just it; she’d thought of herself as powerful. Powerful, not dangerous. Never dangerous.

She’s not so sure, now.

A violent wave of rain lashes her windows, and a flicker of lightning briefly casts the room in stark white. A moment later, thunder rattles the eaves, booming as if someone is sitting on the roof with a timpani drum. She sits up fast, heart rabbiting along, as the last deep rumbles of it fade and the clatter of raindrops against her window resumes.

Her breathing comes fast.

_ Vanya screams when the first words come out, once she realizes what Allison is about to do. She screams and begs, but as the sentence continues its course, the fight weeps out of her. The fury drains from her eyes. Something dull and dead and empty takes its place, as if Allison is carving out part of her sister and leaving nothing but a husk behind. _

She tears back the covers. Thunder roars again, and she’s up, flying to the door, bare feet padding against ice cold hardwood.

_ When her father opens the door, Vanya doesn’t even move. She has to be told to step out of the cage, and take her place at her father’s other side. She doesn’t look at Allison once. _

Allison’s hand stills on the doorknob. It’s very, very against the rules for them to be out of their rooms after bedtime. 

It is very, very much more against the rules to disobey their father’s command. Even if — Allison reasons, thinking fast — he never actually told Allison _not_  to undo it. By the letter of his law, she’s not doing anything wrong.

That won’t help her if she’s caught.

_Vanya sits apart from them at dinner that night, silent. Ben asks her about the book she’s reading, and she mumbles something about being tired before going back to her room. When Luther tries to go after her, their father coldly calls him back to the table._

_ Vanya never comes back. _

Allison turns the knob and tiptoes out into the hall. At night, the rooms of the mansion are drafty and dim, full of strange sounds, and creak when she wades into them. Shadows shift and flit around every corner. She swears that some of the paintings move when she passes by, fingers drifting along the wall to guide her path.

Vanya’s room lies behind a tall black door at the end of the hall, the closest of any to the master bedroom and their father’s study. Allison holds her breath as she eases past on tiptoe, praying to avoid a loose floorboard, and by some merciful deity’s grace, she does. Her heartbeat thrums in her ears as she slinks up to Vanya’s door, but to her surprise, a sliver of gold light pours out from a slim crack in the doorway.

She slinks up to the door and peers through. By the dull light of Vanya’s bedside lamp, she can make out Vanya perched on the side of her bed, head bent forlornly, while Klaus holds her hand and murmurs worriedly. Ben flanks her other side, silently rubbing her shoulder.

“—told you not to talk to me,” Vanya says. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Dad is a dick,” Klaus says. “Wanna go break his stuff?”

“No.”

“My stuff?”

“No.”

“Your stuff?”

“No, Klaus.”

Allison dithers there for a moment, debating whether to interrupt or just sneak back to her room and avoid the guilt of explaining to Klaus and Ben why she’s there.

Then she feels awful for having that thought. She squares her shoulders, lifts her chin, and pushes back the door.

Ben and Klaus snap to attention, although they relax once they realize who it is. “Hey, Allie,” Klaus murmurs. “Mind the door, would you?”

She shuts it behind her. “Hi, Klaus. Ben.” She takes a deep breath. “Vanya.”

“Allison?” Vanya lifts her head. A curtain of hair falls out of her face, and Allison twinges with guilt at the dark circles under her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

Klaus and Ben wait expectantly for the answer. Allison’s stomach ties itself in knots.

“Vanya,” she says, “do you remember — I don’t know how much you remember about today, um, or this afternoon, specifically. Do you remember . . . anything?”

Vanya’s face darkens. “I, um,” she whispers. “I remember being downstairs. With Dad. I was studying alone.”

“Yes?” Allison takes a step forward, eager.

“And it was dark,” she says. “And I was scared. But I couldn’t come back to play with the rest of you, because—” She falters, and lets her hair fall back in her face. “You should go,” she says. “You don’t want to get in trouble because of me.”

“No, keep going,” Allison whispers. She comes to stand awkwardly in front of Vanya, hyperaware of Klaus and Ben’s staring. “Go on, V, what else?”

“Nothing else.” Vanya shakes her head, frowns, shakes it again. “That’s all I remember. That’s all I did.”

“Nothing? You don’t remember what you did in the basement besides study?” Allison pushes, “What did Dad have you doing down there?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“What’s this about?” Klaus demands, brow knitting. “Do you know what’s got V in the dumps?”

“I — um,” Allison says, and tucks some hair behind her ear, face hot. “Yes. I do.”

“What is it?”

She squirms. “I better just — fix it,” she blurts. “It’s my — well, it’s not really my — no,” she corrects herself, firmly, “it is my fault. It’s my fault and I’m going to fix it. And then you can be mad at me. You and Vanya both.” She shifts her weight from one foot to another miserably. Guilt curls hot and writhing in her stomach. “I — I just want to say, before I do anything — or before you don’t want to hear it from me — I’m really, really sorry. I didn’t know — well, I did know, but I didn’t — I didn’t understand what I was doing, and Dad told me to do it, so it’s kind of his fault, but I was the one who did it, like really did it, and that’s my fault and I’m really sorry, Vanya, I’ll never do it again.”

“Allison?” A trace of alarm crosses Vanya’s face. “What are you talking about? What did Dad make you—”

“Just listen, okay. Listen.” Allison takes Vanya’s hands and tugs her to her feet. “I heard a rumor,” she begins, and stops. She has to choose her words carefully, now, selecting them with utmost care. She’s never tried to reverse something she said before, and she finds it’s a startlingly complicated thing to sort out, trying to dance around unintended meanings or implicit suggestions. Fixing her mistake is much harder than making it was.

The wind shrieks against the window. It sounds like a bow drawn roughly over a set of strings, screeching. 

“I heard a rumor you’re special,” she tells Vanya earnestly. “I heard a rumor you’re powerful, and — and extraordinary, and — I heard a rumor that you know you’re one of us and you’ll never forget it. Ever. No matter what Dad — no matter what I say.”

Then she drops Vanya’s hands like she’s been burned and steps back, heart knocking wildly against her ribs.

Vanya blinks. Her eyelids shutter closed and then open with the slow lull of someone just waking up from a long nap.

Then she stares at Allison. She opens her mouth, and gapes, blinking wetness out of her eyes.

“You — you almost — you made me think—”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Is that supposed to help?” Vanya’s voice rises. “Is that supposed to make things better? Allison? What would I have done if you hadn’t decided to undo it? What would have happened to me?”

“I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. I mean it.”

“Do you have any idea how awful that was?”

“Vanya?” Klaus’ voice rises with anxiety. “Allison? You wanna fill us in? Um. Trying not to wig out, over here, but it’s not—”

Vanya swallows. Then she turns her head, her eyes never leaving Allison’s, and tells him.

Allison has to bite down on her tongue. When said out loud, it sounds so much worse than it did in her head. Out loud, every _Dad told me to_  turns into an _Allison did_ , and the difference changes it, somehow. The guilt comes back, and she hates feeling guilty, and what was even the point of doing all this if she was going to feel guilty anyway?

Bad thought. She bites down harder and chastises herself and swallows the temptation to murmur one little _I heard a rumor you forgot all about this_ , swallows the temptation to wash it all away and go sleep soundly with her secrets.

Because she wouldn’t sleep soundly. Not really. She’s figuring this guilt thing out, or at least she’s starting to.

“Jesus,” Klaus swears, and drags a hand down his face. “That’s — that's really fucking scary, Allison, I mean. Wow.”

Ben says, “Have you done that to any of the rest of us?”

The other two freeze up, fear creeping into their expression like ink bleeding through water. She hates that. She hates them looking at her as if she’s some dangerous object, because she’s not. She’s not dangerous, and they’re her brothers and sister and the only people she loves in the world and they’re looking at her as if she’s _dangerous_.

“No!”

“Why should we believe you?”

“Because I’m telling the truth,” she almost wails, biting back the urge to cry. “I’m telling the truth and you should believe me, and if there was some way to turn off my power so you’d believe me I could, I’m sorry and it was the first time I ever did it and I’ll never do it again but I didn’t mean to and I haven’t done it to anyone else, please, please believe me, please—”

“Shush,” Klaus is babbling then, swaying forward as if he can’t help himself, “aw, c’mon, Allie, shush-a-shush, don’t cry, I believe you, it’s okay—”

She stumbles into his arms and hugs him, burying her face in his shoulder and sniffling. He always was a softie, Klaus, more than any of her other brothers. He cared too much to last long in the face of tears.

“If you get snot on my nightshirt then you have to trade with me,” he says quietly, and she gives an ugly weeping guffaw.

Vanya eases herself down on the bed and digs the heels of her palms into her eyes. The floor outside Vanya’s door creaks, and they all still.

Three faint taps come on the door.

“Guys?” Diego whispers from the other side. “A-a-are you all in there?”

A split-second nonverbal exchange passes between the four of them, concluding in Vanya’s quiet, “Yes.”

“C-c-c-c—” He breaks off with a grunt of frustration. “Can I—”

“Yes,” Vanya interrupts, and the door opens.

Diego stands there in his pajamas and a pair of fuzzy slippers, blue striped pants four inches above the ankle and shirt buttoned askew. A knife is held in his left hand, although his grip relaxes when he sees there’s no trouble. “I heard you all talking,” he whispers. “Is everyone okay? What are you guys doing up?”

“Secret business,” Klaus says. “Go back to bed.”

“If you get to be up, I get to be.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Yeah-huh!” Diego cries, and receives four harsh refrains of _'SHHHHH!'_  in rejoinder.

“Maybe we should take this somewhere else,” Allison whispers, with a meaningful nod in the direction of their father’s room.

“Where?”

Thunder booms. Ben yelps. Klaus flinches. All of them wait for the storm to quell a little before speaking again.

“Kitchen,” Klaus suggests. “Nobody’ll hear us in the basement.”

“Kitchen works,” Allison agrees.

 

* * *

 

The kitchen, being underneath the house and low-ceilinged, is among the creepier places in the building to be late at night, but ironically, it feels the safest. The thunder is more distant there, for one thing. It’s farther from Dad’s room, for another.

Vanya sits down at the ancient, gnarled table, and Ben sits to her left. Allison tentatively lays a hand on the chair to her right, and when Vanya doesn’t protest, she sits down quickly. Diego throws his knife into the table, where it embeds itself, handle wobbling, and he flops into the seat opposite her. Allison gives him a dirty look — Pogo hates it when he carves up the table — but says nothing.

“Midnight trysts deserve a midnight snack,” Klaus announces, waltzing over to the stove. He unearths a huge tin of cocoa from one of the cabinets. “Hot chocolate, anyone?”

“Oh, yes please,” Allison says immediately.

“Sure.” Vanya nods shortly. Allison glances at her, then averts her eyes when Vanya catches her looking.

Klaus pulls out a carton of milk from the fridge and decants it into the pot. He dumps a few heaping spoonfuls in with a flourish and then stirs vigorously, turning the act of cocoa making into a kind of artistic interpretative dance. Vanya stifles a giggle into her palm, and he tosses a wink over his shoulder. Nothing ever pleased him so much as an audience, except perhaps applause.

When the hot chocolate is finished, he takes five mugs down from another cabinet and passes them out accordingly. “Marshmallows?”

“Oh, gimme,” Diego says eagerly, and slurps.

“Manners,” Klaus sings airily, and bops him on the head with a spoon. “What do we say when we want something, Diego?”

“Screw you,” Diego exclaims, rubbing the injured spot on his head.

“No, that’s not it. It starts with a P . . . ?”

“Piss off!”

“Points for creativity, but no points for class,” Klaus sighs. “Vanya, what do we say?”

She hides a smile behind the rim of her mug. “Please.”

“There we go!” He hefts and tosses the package of marshmallows over Diego’s head, who makes a fumbling grab for it and misses. Vanya catches it neatly and fishes out a few before passing it to Ben. “You see how easy that was?”

The door creaks open, and a pale, blonde face pokes in from the hallway.  “What’s going on?” Luther hisses. 

“Teenage rebellion,” Klaus says. “Narc and I’ll tell Dad about that time you broke a plate and then hid it under Diego’s bed.”

“Wait,” says Diego. “That was you? You asshole!”

Luther narrows his eyes, nods his understanding, and tiptoes into the room. Behind him, Five’s head pops out from around the corner, scoping out the situation. Deeming it to be worth engaging in, or at least acceptably benign, he wanders in behind Luther, snagging a mug from the cabinet and pouring himself some cocoa. 

“You should all be in bed,” Luther says accusingly.

“Back atcha, big guy,” Klaus says.

“I came to see what you were doing. I’m here for disciplinary purposes.”

“Uh huh. You want some disciplinary hot chocolate, while you're here?”

“. . . If  you’re offering .”

“This is downright cozy,” Five drawls, leaning on the chair between Diego and Klaus. Luther shuffles in beside Allison, and she passes him her mug, which he sips from with a mumbled thanks.  “Any particular reason for the midnight rendezvous?”

“We decided Vanya’s room was getting a little crowded,” Klaus replies. “Marshmallows are over here.”

“Ah. That is perfectly clear and does not raise any further questions at all, whatsoever. Thank you.”

“It’s between me and Allison,” Vanya says, which is the first thing she’s said in a while and also takes Allison entirely by surprise.

Five’s eyes flit between them. His mouth twitches curiously. Then he shrugs and swigs his cocoa. “Fine, then,” he says. “I’ll take that as license not to worry about it.”

“I won’t,” Luther says, frowning. “What happened?”

Allison shakes her head. “I’ll tell you later,” she whispers, and he scowls, shifts unhappily, but lets it lie.

“Yeah, lay off, big guy,” Klaus says, throwing his feet up on the table. “Private matter. Cool kids club only.”

“Then why are you involved?” Luther snips.

He gasps and lays one hand over his heart. “Luther! I’d be hurt, if I wasn’t so busy being stunned you actually managed to be clever.”

“Fight, fight, fight,” Diego whispers loudly. Five rolls his eyes and makes a disgusted noise under his breath. Vanya exchanges a sympathetic look with him.

“We’re not fighting,” Luther tells Diego sternly. Then, casually, into his cocoa: “Because I’d kick his ass.”

“No, he’s right,” Klaus says idly. “Naturally, he’d beat me. He traded his brain cell for the ability to punch real good.”

Luther sets down his mug. “Remind me what you do again?”

“I’m the Séance, baby. Take a guess.”

“Oh, scary. What are you gonna do, bean me with a crystal ball?”

“If you’re going to measure your dicks for the rest of the evening, I’m going back to my room,” Five mutters.

“I’ll join you,” Allison says firmly, taking her cocoa back from Luther in a punitive manner. 

“Besides,” he adds, “Vanya could demolish both of you.”

It’s hard to tell who this remark startles more: Klaus, Luther, or Vanya.

She taps a tentative finger on her chest. “I — my dick?”

“No! I — your powers! Not — Jesus.” Five rubs his eyes. “Vanya, I meant . . . never mind.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” Klaus says. “That is also what I thought, immediately, with no reservations. Her powers.”

“What are those, anyway?” Luther tilts his head. “What does Dad need you alone for every day?” It’s not hard to pluck out the note of jealousy undercutting the question. Vanya seems to hear it, because she gets flustered and avoids his eyes.

“Oh,” she says, “well. I mean, I can break things, I guess.”

“Break things,” Five says curiously.

“And move them, sometimes. And then break them.” She says this quickly, with a distinct current of guilt.

“So,” Five says, steepling his fingers, “have you ever, theoretically, managed to move something without breaking it?”

“No.” She pauses. “Well — no, yes!” She brightens. “I threw Mom across the room, once,” she says excitedly.

Diego chokes. “You did what?”

“Oh, she was fine.” Vanya smiles at the memory. “But yes. So I suppose I have moved something without breaking it.”

“Not reliably, though,” Luther says skeptically.

“No,” Vanya says, her smile fading.

Allison glowers at Luther and takes Vanya’s hand. “That’s okay,” she says encouragingly. “I, uh. I bet you’ll be able to move things without breaking them in no time.”

Vanya swallows, but she laces her fingers silently with Allison’s. “Thanks,” she says quietly.

“Yeah, like,” Diego says, reaching for the marshmallow bag, “I still can’t curve knifes around more than one corner. Or track two at once. That’s what training is for.”

“I’ve barely unlocked an eighth of what I can do, per dear old Dad,” Klaus says. “Stands to reason you haven’t either.”

“I don’t know what all of you are talking about,” Five says flatly, and Vanya tenses— “As if breaking things isn’t an incredibly useful power on its own. You know how helpful that would have been on our last mission? If Vanya could have just broke the door, instead of forcing me to go in blind? I don’t love teleporting places I can’t see, if you must know. It’s like walking backwards off the edge of a cliff.”

Vanya eases her grip on Allison’s hand.

“Or people,” Ben says. “I hate being the one who has to kill people all the time. Maybe Vanya could get to kill them, sometimes.”

“Break their necks, break their spines, break their lungs,” Luther muses. “Yeah, there’s a lot you could do with that one.”

“What’d your name be?” Diego pipes up, scooping another handful of marshmallows from the bag. “Your superhero thing, I mean. Like the ones we’ve got.”

Vanya’s brow furrows in thought. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“Dad gave us our superhero titles,” Allison assures her. “You don’t have to come up with one immediately.”

“Preferably a noun,” Klaus says. “Unless you’re Number One. Then you get to be special.”

“We can figure that out later,” Luther says. “It’s not that important.”

“Of course the one named ‘Spaceboy’ thinks so.”

“The one who got stuck with ‘The Boy’ also thinks so,” Five grumbles, and plucks the marshmallow bag out of from Diego’s hands.

“Yeah, that’s rough,” Klaus allows.

They sip their hot chocolate in contemplation.

“Five,” Allison says, pausing, “why don’t you have a name?”

Five finishes piling a marshmallow fleet on top of his hot chocolate and passes the bag back to Diego, who dumps several straight into his mouth. “I do have one,” he replies evenly.

“No,” says Vanya, as though it’s just dawned on her. “You don’t.”

“I have a word that people call me when they require my attention. That’s a name.”

“You have a designation,” Diego interrupts, his mouth full of marshmallows.

“A number isn’t a name,” Allison says sternly. “Like how my name isn’t The Rumor. Just because it’s something people call you doesn’t make it your name.”

“Semantics.”

“Important semantics,” she counters.

“You should have a name,” says Vanya. “We all have names. Why don’t you?”

“Yeah,” says Diego, suspiciously. “Why don’t you have one, anyway?”

“Mom gave the rest of us names,” agrees Luther. “You should have one.” Then he flushes, glancing around, as if their father is going to materialize from the shadows at a mere whisper of defiance.

“Mom offered.” Five lifts his chin, a little defiantly. “I said no.”

“Why?” Allison tilts her head, not judgmental, just perplexed.

“Did you not like yours? You can ask for another one,” Ben says. “She tried to name me Eugene, at first.” He pulls a face.

“Eugene isn’t a bad name,” Vanya objects.

“For a geriatric cat, maybe.”

“Maybe she thought it suited you.”

Ben’s mouth drops open. She smirks into her hot chocolate.

“I didn’t need one.” Five shrugs aggressively. “I don’t. Five works fine.”

“Nobody needs one,” Klaus drawls, rolling his eyes. “But sometimes it’s nice to introduce a little — I don’t know, pretense of humanity?”

“For what purpose?”

“God, you sound like Dad,” he says, and there’s a collective wince. “‘For what purpose’? Not everything has to have the fate of the world hinged on it. Sometimes things can just be . . .” He gestures haplessly in frustration, searching for the right word.

“Nice,” Allison finishes softly. Klaus snaps his fingers and points at her, nodding.

“It would be confusing,” Five insists stiffly. “And it would take time to get used to.”

“That’s not a good reason.”

“It’s a fine reason, and this is all pointless.” He stirs his hot chocolate vigorously.

“What do you think,” Klaus muses, cradling his chin in his palm. “Does he look like a Michael?”

“No,” Allison disagrees, her nose wrinkling. “He’s too short for a Michael.”

“Well, we’re twelve, Allison, so he’s got some time to grow into it.”

“Imagine calling him Mike,” Ben pipes up, and both of them cringe simultaneously.

“Christopher?” Luther suggests. 

“That’s not bad,” Klaus admits.

“Chris,” Ben warns, summoning another collective shaking of heads.

“What did Mom try to name you?” Allison asks, frowning. “She has a way of picking good ones. Ben notwithstanding,” she adds, giving him a respectful glance. He accepts it with a demure nod.

“I don’t remember,” Five snaps, “because it was pointless, and stupid, just like this is, so—”

“You don’t even have an idea?”

“Yeah, c’mon, Five, what was it?”

“Tell us.”

“Tell us!”

He shakes his head.

“Five.”

“Five?”

“Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive.”

“We can do this all night, just so you know—”

“Fine!” He throws up his hands, glaring at the ceiling. “It was Aidan! She tried to call me Aidan! There! Are you satisfied, you vultures?”

A beat passes. The other six give him a thoughtful once-over.

“No.”

“Yeah, no.” 

“Absolutely not.”

“Not an Aidan.”

“She whiffed that one,” Diego agrees reluctantly.

“So, to the drawing board, then,” Klaus announces, and claps his hands together. “Suggestions?”

“I like Edmund,” Vanya murmurs.

He opens his mouth with some skepticism, but pauses, and gives Five — now hunched over the table with his arms folded, face crumpled in a scowl, and a flush stealing rapidly over his cheeks — another look.

“That . . . isn’t bad.”

“It’s a little old-fashioned,” Diego says.

“Could call him Ed for short,” Luther suggests. “It’s pretty easy to remember.”

“What does it mean?” Allison asks Vanya, kindly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she replies shyly. “It’s just the name of a boy in a book I’m reading. He reminds me a lot of Five, so.” With everyone’s attention fixed on her, she curls in on herself self-consciously. “But someone else might have a better idea.”

“I like it,” Ben volunteers.

“Is that a majority?” Klaus makes a show of peering around and counting heads. “I think that is. Now, for the baptism—”

Five sits up ramrod straight. “Don’t you dare,” he warns.

“I’m thinking we go dunk him in the bathtub, personally—”

A flash of blue, and Five appears in the doorway, clutching his hot chocolate warily. “Try it,” he hisses. “I’ll teleport us both fifty feet over the Atlantic and leave you there, see if I care.”

“A sacrifice I’m willing to make,” Klaus says cheerfully, and stands up. Five’s eyes go wide, and then he vanishes in another fizzle of blue, reappearing nowhere in the room.

Luther sighs, shoving chair back. “Great. Thanks, Klaus. I’ll go get him.”

“Stay,” Allison sighs, and tugs him back into his seat. “He’ll be back soon. Five always is.”

“Not if he locked himself in the basement again,” Diego snickers. “Remember? He didn’t have enough juice to get out that one time, and he—”

“—had to climb out the air vent,” Allison giggles, “I remember now, oh my God—”

“—and then he came out—”

“—at _dinner_ ,” she finishes gleefully. “And Dad—”

“He was sitting there waiting for him,” Vanya says softly, a smile curling the edge of her mouth, “getting more impatient by the minute. He thought Five was tardy; I’ve never seen him so furious.”

“And then,” Allison manages, between giggling gasps, “Five comes tumbling out of the air vent right over the dinner table, and lands—”

_“Right there!”_ Diego slaps the table with an enormous grin. “In f-f-f-front of everybody! Covered in dust and cobwebs and everything!”

“And then Dad says — Dad says — oh, Dad says—”

“Number Five!” Luther feigns a dramatic glower, lower lip jutting out in mocking mimicry, and slams the table with his fists, doing a near-perfect impression of their father’s stiff, accented tenor. “What is the meaning of this interruption!”

They descend into shrieking cackles of laughter. The wide kitchen sends echoes ricocheting around the room, disturbing the silence even after they’ve calmed somewhat. Someone shifts in the building overhead, and they quiet down quickly, their breathing heavy, although a stray giggle still escapes now and then.

“But you forgot the best part,” Vanya adds, now smiling in earnest. “You remember what his answer was? He turned around, still lying on the table, and he looks Dad in the eye, and he says—”

“Sorry, Father,” comes a voice from the doorway. Five stands there, his hands in his pockets, an amused smile worn reluctantly on his face. “I was aiming for the chair.”

It gets a roar of laughter and cheers. Klaus actually springs up and bows, and Five stares at his shoes with the twitching cheeks of someone trying very hard not to grin. He teleports back to his chair, and the others scoot to accommodate him as he sits down.

“You were my hero,” Klaus says fervently. “I wanted to give you a round of applause.”

“I was terrified,” Allison marvels. “I thought I’d have to stop him from killing you.”

“I thought we all would,” Luther says, somewhat abashed. “I was too afraid to laugh.”

“Me, too.”

“I don’t think he knew how to process it,” Vanya says. “Five doesn’t get in trouble. Dad never had to discipline him before.”

“Course he didn’t,” Klaus agrees. “I mean, Perfect Five messed up! He didn’t know how to react!”

“He spent about an hour yelling at me for it,” Five mutters. “I wasn’t Perfect Five after that.”

A sympathetic murmur runs through the group. Then silence descends like a cold veil, swallowing the warmth and levity of the conversation in one fell swoop. Five grimaces as if he regrets the remark, but he doesn’t take it back, and nobody comments on it.

Vanya grips her mug so tightly her knuckles turn white. Then she lifts her head bravely. “Well, I never liked Perfect Five, anyway,” she says, defiantly, and then looks around defensively, as if prepared to argue it to the bitter end. 

“He was boring,” she adds, when the others keep staring. Ben coughs, and nods.

“Nowhere near as cool,” Klaus agrees.

“Or as funny,” Allison chimes in.

Diego thumps Five on the shoulder. “N—n—no brother of mine is a t-t- _total_  goody-two-shoes.”

The five of them look at Luther expectantly. He squares his jaw and shifts uncomfortably. Allison kicks him under the table.

“Ow! I — it’s not good to get in trouble,” he says stoutly. “But I . . . do . . . think it was funny, and . . . Dad might have overreacted. To you messing up.” He folds his arms. “I mean, it’s not like you’re Number One, so it’s probably okay.”

Klaus sighs, and pinches his nose, but Allison pats Luther’s arm appreciatively.

Five stares holes into the floor. His cheeks glow suspiciously pink. He blinks several times in rapid succession.

“You’re all embarrassing,” he says hotly.

“But you love us,” Klaus croons, leaning over to plant his chin on Five’s shoulder. Five shrugs him off. “Don’t deny it. You luuuuuurve us. Aw, look, he’s blushing.”

“Die.”

“Aw, Edmund’s embarrassed!” Allison clasps her hands. “That’s so sweet!”

“My name isn’t Edmund!”

“Edmund Hargreeves is a big ol’ softie,” Diego singsongs. 

“I’m not!”

“Ha! M-man, you’re such a dweeb.”

“Don’t listen to them,” Vanya tells him. “I still think you’re cool.”

“Thank you, Vanya,” he says, straining for dignity. “You’re very kind. As for the rest of you: I hate you, and I’m never speaking to you again.”

“You will,” Klaus coos. “Because you love us.”

“I do not.”

Luther grins. “Wow, you’re kind of red, F-Edmund,” he says, and he only stumbles a little over the word. “Almost like you’re lying.”

“I’m red because I’m trying to teleport to another continent, Luther, you cretinous buffoon. Preferably one that doesn’t have you all on it.”

“Run all you want, you can’t escape family bonding,” Klaus sings.

“Much like a bear trap, apparently.”

“Stop teasing him,” Vanya says valiantly. “He’s shy.”

He splutters. “I’m not—!”

Klaus is ecstatic. “Oh, sorry, little bwuvver, I didn’t know you were _shy.”_

“Aw, is someone b-b-bashful? Does he need Mommy?”

“Vanya,” Five hisses. “Not helping.”

“Well, I’m sorry, I was just trying to—”

“Hey,” Allison cuts across sternly. “Don’t make me calm you all down.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Klaus scoffs. “No powers outside of training, that’s Dad’s rule.”

“Oh, yeah?” Her eyes glitter. “I heard a rumor Klaus shut up for five whole minutes.”

He gasps, but no sound comes out. Stricken and offended, he turns to Diego, whacks him on the shoulder, and points at her.

“What? W-w-what do you want me to do?”

He points again, more furiously, at Allison.

“I’m not avenging you, bro. She can shut me down just as fast as you.”

Allison smirks. Klaus withdraws with an injured pout.

“That was really not allowed,” Luther says, his voice high, and Allison rolls her eyes.

“Don’t be such a baby, Luther.”

“I’m serious! It’s like one of the most important rules!”

“I’ve seen you use super strength to vacuum under the sofa,” she shoots back, and his mouth snaps shut, cheeks warming. “What would Dad say about that one, Spaceboy?”

“He — he would—”

Footsteps echo from the hallway outside the kitchen, even and steady. Stairs creak under someone’s foot. The children freeze. Klaus ducks behind Five.

“Everyone give me your hands,” Five whispers, reaching across the table.

“You can’t take all of us,” Vanya whispers back worriedly. “That’s too many to get all the way upstairs.”

“I don’t need to get us upstairs, just out of this room.”

“What if you can’t? We might get stuck—”

“We won’t get stuck! And if you don’t hurry, we’re not going anywhere, so—”

“Wait.” Luther holds up a hand, and they falls silent. The steps grow closer and clearer, resolving into sharp clicks of heels on tile. “That’s not Dad.”

A shadow falls in front of the hallway light. It’s smaller than their father, vaguely human, and wears a wide-fanned skirt.

Grace steps into the doorway. Distant blue eyes drift over the scene in the kitchen — Five’s arms outstretched over the table, marshmallow bag torn open in the center, cocoa tin left out by the sink — and her beatific smile never falters.

“Children,” she says serenely. “It’s past your bedtime.”

They glance at each other, waiting for someone to speak. Luther clears his throat.

“Uh, we know,” he said. “We . . . um. We—”

“Training,” squeaks Vanya.

“Yes! Training.” He nods quickly. “We were training. Since we couldn’t sleep. And we wanted to, uh, continue with our lessons.”

“In the kitchen,” says Grace.

“Yes.”

“At night,” says Grace.

“Yes.”

“Over hot cocoa.”

“Yes,” Luther says, wincing.

Grace inclines her head in a way that indicates she knows he’s lying. It seems affectionate, but then, everything Grace does seems affectionate. That won’t stop her from telling their father. That understanding seems to strike everyone at once, because a number of alarmed glances are exchanged.

“Mom,” Diego says, sounding very small.

“Yes, Diego?”

“Please don’t tell Dad.”

Grace blinks, and then looks around at their faces. Her lips part, but no sound comes out.

“Please,” Ben bursts out.

“Ben,” she begins.

“Please? Mom?”

She stares at him for a moment. Then she says, “Tell him what, Diego? All of us are in bed.”

Then she smiles a bit wider, steps out of the doorway, and retreats down the hall from whence she came. Her footsteps fade back into muffled clicks, and then silence.

“Quick,” Five hisses, and the others hurry to grab his hands. He screws his eyes shut and there’s a flash of blue large enough to light up the entire room, and then the kitchen is empty.

 

* * *

 

Two stories above, seven children come tumbling onto the rug of Five’s room, cussing and complaining with considerable volume.

“Ow!”

“Edmund, that _hurt.”_

“I landed on my hip, I think it’s broken—”

“No, you landed on _my_  hip, jerk—”

“Why are we in your room?”

“I panicked,” Five snaps, standing up and brushing himself off. “Where else would you have me put us?”

“I dunno,” Diego says philosophically, flopping spread-eagle on his back. “Somewhere that’s n-n-not the size of a closet?”

“It seems smaller because there are seven people in it,” Five says acidly. “Most rooms meant for one person will.”

“Not my room,” Allison grumbles, sitting up and rubbing her head. “My room is nice and big. And it’s got a comfier carpet.”

“Ditto,” says Luther.

“Right,” he says irritably. “Well, next time you need me to save all your asses from getting busted, I’ll take that into account.”

“Thank you, Edmund,” Vanya says dutifully, and he flashes her a gratified look. A chorus of ‘thank you, Edmunds’ rise from the others, some more resentfully than others. Klaus stabs a palpably frustrated thumbs-up at him, and Luther sighs.

“Allison, fix Klaus.”

“I heard a rumor Klaus could talk again,” she mumbles, still rubbing her head, and he draws a deep lungful of breath.

“Allison Hargreeves, I’m never speaking to you again in my life.”

“Works for me,” she says, a bit meanly, and he sticks out his tongue at her.

“We should get back to bed,” Luther says. He holds out a hand and helps Allison up, then Vanya. “We already almost got in trouble.”

“Don’t want to risk it further,” Allison agrees.

“I’m tired,” Diego says, and the latter word is bisected by a wide yawn. “Klaus, race you downstairs?”

“You’re on, knife boy.”

“I’m tired, too,” Vanya mumbles, rubbing her eyes. “Edmund, can you teleport me back?”

“I’m not a taxi service.”

“Yeah, but my room’s down the hall from Dad’s,” she says. His lips purse, but he gives a short, sharp nod.

“Hey,” Ben says oddly, and they all look at him.

His face is turned to the window. He steps slowly up to it, breath fogging the glass, and presses his cheek against it. “It’s stopped raining,” he says.

The others wander over, gathering in a small knot under the window. Outside, the clouds have peeled back, and the moon gleams bright and full over a lawn fresh with dew. Stars litter the sky and crown the ridges of nearby buildings. A still and breathless silence comes over the world, as if suspended in a moment of rest after being washed clean.

Vanya sits down at the foot of the bed, and Ben hops up, sitting against the headboard. Allison, still gazing at the window, perches beside Vanya. Luther eases in beside Ben. Klaus sprawls haphazardly on a diagonal, his head lolling back to rest beside Ben’s hip. Diego mimics him, tossing his legs across Vanya’s lap, who startles a bit at the contact, and then carefully adjusts herself so as not to disturb him. 

Five pauses, surveying them. Then he gives up with a short sigh and clambers in next to Diego. “Move,” he hisses, and Diego mumbles in irritation but shifts anyway.

They’re packed into a space too small to fit all of them, their limbs tangled together and heads knocking against one another’s, but with some squirming, they settle into a position that’s almost comfortable, and where everyone can peer out at the clear night sky.

Luther reaches over and tugs the spare comforter from the foot of the bed. Five stifles his complaint when Luther billows it out and settles it carefully over all of them. Vanya’s head falls against Allison’s shoulder, her breath easing with sleep. Klaus mumbles and settles to use Diego’s lap as a pillow, which Diego only grumbles about briefly, and under his breath, before doing the same to Luther’s shoulder and promptly falling asleep. Five, resigned, despairs of ever getting them out of his room, and with a certain degree of sufferance he allows Klaus to cuddle him in his sleep.

It isn’t all that bad.

Not that he’d ever admit that to any of them; God knows what liberties they’d take then.

Vanya mumbles something in her sleep, and Allison shifts. Vanya quiets. Ben sniffles. Klaus snores.

The wind whistles in the eaves. It sounds faintly like the long, rich note of a violin.


	2. Blue Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We are not doing the Shitty Power Olympics,” Allison insists, flopping back on the couch with an air of desperate exasperation. “We’ve done the Shitty Power Olympics. Nobody likes the Shitty Power Olympics. Nobody wins.”
> 
> “We don’t have to do the Shitty Power Olympics. Because I’d win them,” Ben says pointedly. “Defending champion, thirteen years running.”

Sometimes, Reginald leaves the house for a day. He rarely explains why he does this, since he answers to precisely nobody and no one, but when begged he will admit that it concerns business. The children more or less accept that it has to do with the mysterious source of his unfathomably immense wealth, which none of them fully understand and few care to, and their interest expires shortly thereafter. He typically departs around seven in the morning, and returns near ten o’clock at night. In short, he leaves the children to their own devices for a whopping fifteen hours, in which they are unreservedly free to do as they wish. Certainly he leaves orders for them to obey, but without an enforcement mechanism, such instructions can be considered mere wishful thinking. 

These trips happen infrequently, since he does most of his business at home, but on the rare days that it does, the children have grown adept at looking after themselves, and carrying out their normal schedule in ways befitting the attendees of such a prestigious academy. They are, after all, a group of exceptionally mature and intelligent young people.

 

* * *

 

“He’s gone!” Klaus hauls his head in from the window and slams it shut gleefully, creating a shudder that reverberates throughout the house. “Hallelujah! Ben, get the blender.”

Ben darts out of his room and races down the stairs two at a time, shoes thundering on hardwood. Allison pops her head out from behind her door and yells, “Gone, or _gone_ -gone?”

“Car’s out of sight,” Diego affirms, emerging from his room. “I watched it go. Coast’s clear.”

“And Mom?”

“She’s charging. Two hours left, maybe three.”

“Hold it,” Luther warns, planting himself in front of the staircase. Allison narrows her eyes. “We’ve been on this carousel before. It never ends well, they always notice—”

“You heard Diego. Dad’s gone, Mom’s charging—”

“And Pogo is still in his room, plus Dad could notice the scratches on the floor—”

“Wetblanketsayswhat?” Klaus calls from the other side of the mezzanine, and then leaps up to straddle the bannister, sliding down to the foyer with a wild whoop of joy. Vanya follows at a more sedate pace, grinning.

“I’m not a wet blanket! I’m just being careful!”

“Hey, Luther,” Klaus says, flinging open the drawing room doors. “Do you have to reinsert that stick up your ass every morning, or do you keep it in while you sleep?”

Allison snickers. Luther gives her a look of utmost betrayal.

“He’s not wrong,” Diego calls, and vaults over the railing of the mezzanine, dropping ten feet to the foyer below. Luther lurches in an abortive attempt to stop him, but it’s too late. Diego rolls into the landing and runs into the drawing room after Klaus. “Hey, Allie, first one there picks the music!”

“That’s not fair! Luther’s in my way!”

“That sounds like a you problem!” The door swings shut behind him on his laughter.

Allison glares at Luther. “Move,” she orders him, and then races for the staircase. He hurls himself to the side and flattens himself against the wall to avoid being steamrolled, grimacing as she rushes past.

“You’re all being irresponsible,” he hollers, folding his arms.

“Go sulk about it,” someone returns. It’s hard to tell who at a distance. Probably Klaus. Statistically, Klaus.

He spends several seconds actually doing so, before he realizes it and shakes himself off. Still glowering, and ignoring the increasingly loud ruckus coming from the drawing room, he marches down to the Five’s doorway and knocks.

No answer comes. He knocks again.

After that, too, fails to get an answer, he lets himself in.

Five perches cross-legged on his bed, a book in his lap and headphones over his ears. When the door opens, he tugs the headphones down to hang around his neck and looks up with the pinched, irritable expression of someone just interrupted from their reading, which uncannily resembles Five’s resting expression in all but a slender collection of lines about the mouth.

“What do you want?” he demands.

“Dad’s gone,” Luther says shortly. “No lessons today. Or missions.”

“Yes, I heard,” Five replies, dropping his eyes back to his book. “I think the whole neighborhood did, actually.”

“The others are downstairs. In the drawing room.”

“The usual?”

“Yes,” says Luther, through gritted teeth.

“Bet you hate that.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to stop them?”

“I’m flattered that you think I can.”

“Don’t be. It was a courtesy question; I’m well aware they could physically overpower you without difficulty.” Five turns a page.

Luther sets his jaw and physically restrains himself from a retort. “Are you going to join them?”

Five shrugs insouciantly. “Probably not.”

“Good.” Luther pauses. “Because you shouldn’t.”

“Okay.”

“Because it’s against the rules.”

“I’m aware.”

“And Dad wouldn’t want you to.”

“Jesus, stop asking for permission already,” Five says testily. “Just go join them, I won’t tell.”

Luther shuffles his feet. “I don’t . . . I mean, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was just asking—”

Five slams the book shut and gives Luther a look that strikes a clean balance between exhaustion and disgust. “Do you need a blood covenant or something? I told you I won’t tell. My lips are sealed by the ironclad glue of not giving a shit. Now, if you don’t mind, I was hoping to finish this book before I turn forty.”

“Fine,” Luther snaps, shuffling out of the room. “Have fun with your dumb book, or whatever.” As he closes the door behind him, he mutters, “Sorry I asked.”

“You should be,” Five informs him through the wall.

 

* * *

 

“Get the furniture out of the way,” Klaus orders, sweeping an ice cream scoop with the grandeur of a conductor’s baton. “Put the sofa by the fireplace, the rugs have to be all the way back, or it won’t work — Luther! Thank God you’re here, Diego’s been pretending he can lift for ten minutes already—”

“Hey!”

“For the record,” Luther says loudly, bending and hefting with ease the sofa that Diego had been straining to push with his full weight against it, “this is all against the rules, and I was opposed to this from the beginning, so I am only here to monitor and contain—”

“Yada, yada, yes, thank you, Credible Hulk, your affidavit can be submitted later. Can you put it next to the armchair? The leather one, with the throw pillow. Yes. There. Thank you.”

Ben hauls a tub of ice cream onto the bar, and sets out six tall hurricane cocktail glasses. Vanya drags in a box of records from the library. Allison and Diego roll back the enormous Turkish embroidered rug, unveiling a rosy, if somewhat scratched, hardwood floor. With the furniture shoved unceremoniously to the side of the room, the space does a passable impression of a ballroom.

“Put on Pat Benatar,” Allison calls to Vanya.

“Vanya, belie that, get out the Styx album!”

Allison rounds on him. “We are absolutely not listening to your weird eclectic rock bands, Diego, if I have to sit through another four hours of men yelling and vamping on the guitar I’m going to scream—”

“Better that than Pat Benatar!”

“In The Heat Of The Night is a _classic.”_

“Hey, Allie, you want cherries on your shake?” Klaus hands Luther a hurricane glass brimming with ice cream, chocolate sauce layered generously over the top. Luther stabs it pensively with a pink straw and attempts to sip it in a disapproving manner, which doesn’t work, since he is very obviously enjoying himself.

“Yes, please!”

“Gotcha. Ben, load that sucker up.”

Ben obediently cracks open the Tupperware container of maraschino cherries and upends it over Allison’s glass of ice cream, peppering the white snowdrifts of vanilla with a barrage of scarlet candy. Klaus hops up on a barstool and helps himself to a heaping spoonful of ice cream straight from the gallon before Ben snatches the spoon from his hand, scowling.

“Gross!”

“I’m only human. Vanya, where’s the music?”

“In dispute,” she replies, rifling through the record box.

“Just pick something!”

“I’m trying!”

Allison pops a cherry in her mouth, chews, and then leers at Luther with syrup-stained teeth. He rolls his eyes and sticks his tongue out at her, dark with chocolate fudge. She laughs and kicks his shin.

“How about Whitney Houston?”

“Eh,” Diego says skeptically, accepting his cocktail glass and straw. He empties a package of chocolate chips over his glass.

“Elvis?”

“Vanya, darling, play what you like,” Klaus orders. He bats his eyes apologetically at Ben, who glares at him before scooping him a milkshake of his own. “Surprise us.”

“Are you sure?” Vanya curls her fingers around one record, lifting it from the box. “I — I mean, I want to play something everyone will like—”

“Oh, don’t worry, that’s never going to happen. So you might as well take your pick. Diego can go listen to his emo punk bands later.”

“Why did we all decide to shit on _my_  taste?”

“Natural selection,” says Allison.

“Bandwagon effect,” says Ben.

“Common sense,” says Klaus. “Vanya! Lead us off!”

“Okay,” she says worriedly, “okay, okay, okay,” and she drops the needle onto the record player. A quick set of dampened piano chords leap from the speaker, accompanied by a hasty roll of drums, and then the synths start plunking along.

“Oh, hell yeah, V, let’s go,” Klaus cheers, and leaps from his stool, milkshake still in hand, to spin out into the center of the room. “Good pick.”

“Yeah?” Vanya tucks her hair behind her ear, looking up hopefully.

“Yeah, idiot. Now get some ice cream already, I want you to dance with me. Allison won’t twirl me and Diego insists on leading, you’re the only person in this house who’s worth half a damn as a dance partner.”

“You’re too tall for me to twirl,” Allison calls, fondly exasperated.

“You don’t even know how to lead,” Diego says, less fondly exasperated.

“Fine,” Vanya agrees, biting down on a smile, “if you insist,” and she gets up, brushing off her knees. Meanwhile, Klaus sways to himself in the middle of the dance floor, humming.

_Sun is shining in the sky_

_There ain’t a cloud in sight_

“Fudge?” Ben asks, stirring her milkshake.

“Thanks.”

“Running down the avenue! See how the sun shines brightly, in the city—”

Diego groans. “Klaus, anybody ever tell you that you sing like a penguin flies?”

Klaus responds not by giving a rebuttal, but by singing louder, and more deliberately off key: “Mister Blue Sky! Please tell us why! You had to hide away for so long—” He seizes Vanya by the arm and tugs her out to spin her. She yelps and clutches her milkshake to avoid spilling it. “Where did we go wrong? Mister Blue Sky! Please tell us why—”

“I want in,” Allison announces, although she sets her milkshake down first. “Luther, do you know how to lead?”

“It’s a trick question,” Diego warns him, but not before Luther answers:

“No,” with a puzzled tilt of his head, and Allison grins.

“Great! I do. Come on.”

For someone strong enough to hurl any one of them across the room, he’s surprisingly pliant when she hauls him out to spin beside Klaus and Vanya. She grabs his hands and more or less puppeteers him into swaying from one foot to the other in approximation of dance. All of it looks thoroughly artificial and awkward, but heartfelt.

_Hey, you, with the pretty face_

_Welcome to the human race_

Klaus flings a hand out toward Diego. “Come on,” he hollers. “Get off your ass.”

“Excuse me?”

_“Dance,_  arschloch!”

“Nah, I’m good over here,” he says, and slurps his shake.

“Dieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—”

“Stop.”

“—eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeego.”

“No.”

“Luther,” Klaus says simply, and Luther, sighing, lets go of Allison’s hands and strolls over.

“Wait,” Diego says, scrambling to set down his drink, “wait, no, listen, I didn’t mean that, listen, Luther, okay, wait—”

“You brought this on yourself,” Luther tells him matter-of-factly, and promptly lifts Diego up from the stool, thrashing and squirming, before carrying him bridal-style over to Klaus, who welcomes the delivery with open arms.

“Diego!” he exclaims. “You joined in!”

“Put me down! Let me go, or I swear I’ll — where are my knives—” Luther deposits him more or less on top of Klaus, to the dismay of one but not both. Klaus attempts to twirl Diego, which goes poorly, but Allison’s subsequent attempt succeeds, if only because he becomes resigned to it at that point.

Allison calls Ben to join them, who goes only after a lot of energetic beckoning on behalf of everybody, and by then the song has lapsed into the instrumental solo, which of course necessitates a full set of enthusiastic air guitars. Vanya and Ben scrap together a shambling kind of jitterbug by the record player, while Allison and Klaus set aside their differences re: twirling, or the lack thereof, and pull off a truly remarkable Viennese waltz. Diego and Luther hop around doing nothing resembling dancing by reasonable metrics, but having fun nevertheless.

_But soon comes mister night, creeping over_

_ Now his hand is on your shoulder _

Scuff marks and scratches pepper the hardwood. The sun pours through the bay windows, revealing swirling galaxies of dust overhead, and the record player blares. The room smells of sugar and sweat and furniture polish. Their feet thump on the floor, drumming arrhythmic beats that reverberate through the old walls, and the foundations groan, and the record player blares loud enough to dwarf even that, and the house — so often silent — is full and singing with noise.

Happiness surges up Vanya’s throat like a surge of carbonated bubbles, and she spins, laughing. The sunbeams whirl over her head, pale yellow bars blurring with the twirling golden arches of the vaulted ceiling, and she closes her eyes. She feels dizzy and light, as if a pair of weights have been unbound from her ankles, and a breeze from her movement tosses her hair back and she laughs again and she spins, spins, spins, until the world is turning with her.

“—Vanya— Vanya! _Vanya!”_

Her eyes snap open.

She’s drifting somewhere around the chandelier. At twenty feet above the ground, she’s closer to the ceiling than the floor, near enough to brush the vaulted wood with her fingertips. Her hair spreads in a halo around her head like an astronaut’s in zero-gravity. Blearily, she looks down.

The other five gape at her with some mixture of fear and confusion from below. Ben is frozen in place; Allison’s hands clasp over her mouth. She twists in midair, and there’s a moment between when she realizes where she is and where she should be where the only reaction that strikes her is confusion:  _Why are they staring? What’s wrong with me?_

Then her stomach drops, and she shrieks, and then the rest of her drops, too.

_“Catch her,”_  Allison screams, and Diego dives forward, but it’s Luther who gets there first. She lands in the cradle of his arms with an impact that drives a grunt out of him and makes his knees buckle, knocking the breath from her lungs. She clings to his shoulders while the feeling returns to her legs, gasping for air. A surge of tremors tears through her spine.

The others swarm her, all talking over each other at once. Luther carefully lowers her to the ground, where she curls into a tight fetal position, her breath coming shallow and fast.

“Vanya!”

“What happened to her?”

“Is she all right?”

“V, can you hear me?”

“Vanya!”

There’s too much noise. It was nice before, but now it’s suffocating. Five voices clash and babble in her head, circling, tearing through her thoughts like vultures dining on raw meat, and she claps her hands over her ears. Her skull rings. A small whimper escapes her throat. A tingling sensation builds in her fingertips; the desire that builds in her isn’t to hurt anybody so much as it’s to make them _quiet,_  to give her half a second of peace to _think—_

Blue light flashes. 

“What’s going on?” Five demands. Sharp, short footsteps ring against the floor, first slow, then faster. “What’s wrong with her?”

He wrestles his way between Klaus and Ben, elbowing both out of the way. “What did you do?”

“We didn’t do anything,” Klaus says indignantly. “She started floating!”

Five squints like he just took a shot of lemon juice. “What the fuck?”

“It’s true,” Luther says grimly. “We were just — you know, and then she—”

Klaus mutters, “Dancing, Luther. You can say the word, we’re not in Footloose.”

“—well, she just started floating. Right up to the chandelier.”

“And then she fell,” Allison adds. She brushes some of Vanya’s hair out of her face tentatively, checking for bruises, with a helplessness that suggests it’s only because she doesn’t know what else to do. 

“Fell, or descended?”

“Fell,” Luther says. “I had to catch her.”

“She didn’t seem to realize she was doing it,” Allison says worriedly.

“How?”

“I don’t know! It’s not like I can use my powers without thinking about it.”

“Ditto,” says Luther.

“Ditto,” Five murmurs, brow knit.

“Definitely not,” Ben mumbles.

Klaus grimaces and tilts his hand from side to side, equivocating.

Vanya stirs. The others burst into murmurs, pressing closer, and she makes a noise of distress, at which they skitter back.

“Is she awake?”

“Vanya, can you hear us?”

“Can you tell us what happened?”

“Give her some space,” Luther orders. He picks her up again, carries her over to a sofa wedged against the wall, and settles her down gingerly.

Vanya’s head throbs. She slowly sits up, propping herself against the arm of the sofa, and massages her temples while her headache abates. 

“I don’t know what happened,” she manages, and braces herself when a wave of nausea crests over her head. “I — I was just dancing.”

“Has that ever happened before?” Allison lowers herself to sit next to her, and reaches out to take her hand.

“No. I swear, I’ve never, ever—”

“Calm down,” Five interrupts. “So it hasn’t happened before. Why now?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t have any idea what caused it?”

“No,” she says miserably. Then: “I just felt happy.”

Silence asserts itself, then, complete and thick. Vanya swallows and regards her knees. Five paces, aggressively pondering. Diego scuffs the floor with his heel, and Allison gives him a chiding look.

“Flight is pretty kickass,” Ben says, apropos of nothing.

Vanya hiccups a laugh without meaning to. Five hides his smile quickly.

“I mean, as powers go,” Ben says, “mine is still objectively the shittiest.”

“He has a point,” says Klaus matter-of-factly.

“I’m just saying, Vanya. Let me know when tentacles start ripping through _your_  chest.”

“We are not doing the Shitty Power Olympics,” Allison insists, flopping back on the couch with an air of desperate exasperation. “We’ve done the Shitty Power Olympics. Nobody likes the Shitty Power Olympics. Nobody wins.”

“We don’t have to do the Shitty Power Olympics. Because I’d win them,” Ben says pointedly. “Defending champion, thirteen years running.”

“And Luther once tore off the bath faucet trying to get a shower! So?”

“I have literal demons living in my chest, but sure. Continue to tell me how hard life is for Luther because sometimes he breaks things on accident.”

“Dad locked me in the mausoleum when I was five,” Klaus muses, hopping on the armrest beside Vanya. “Because of my powers. That’s gotta be a silver medal or something.”

“Call it a tie,” Vanya mumbles. He squeezes her shoulder by way of apology.

“We’re not doing it! No! Nope! The last time this happened, you guys made Diego cry.”

“I did not cry.”

“Sounds like something a crier would say,” Ben says, and Diego flips him off.

“‘You guys’ is a weird way of pronouncing ‘we,’ Allie,” Klaus says. “Sore that you lost?”

“No! I’m not sore that my power doesn’t suck, because I’m not a miserable person.”

“This is pointless,” Five says flatly, and Allison nods in fervent agreement. “You realize that we have a total of ten hours before Dad gets back.” When confronted with a number of blank stares, he sighs and elaborates. “We could be using that time to figure out what else Vanya can do.”

Vanya immediately stiffens. “I don’t know if that’s safe,” she says worriedly. “I don’t have control over my powers; I could do anything with them. They could do anything to any of you.”

“Not sure why you think that’s an argument against training,” Five says frankly, “and I don’t care. You should be practicing. If I just learned I could fly, I wouldn’t be anywhere near the ground, I’d tell you that.”

“But I don’t know how,” she insists. “How am I supposed to practice if I don’t know—”

“Oh, I know the answer to that one,” Klaus says, sounding more surprised than anyone else at this fact. “Pressure.”

She startles. Five opens his mouth to retort, and then closes it, narrows his eyes. “Elaborate.”

“He’s right,” Luther says, albeit shell-shocked. “High stress situations force instinctive reactions, which can quickly forge new neural pathways, increasing reflexes and grace under pressure.” A beat passes while the others regard him oddly. Defensively, he adds, “Honestly, it’s like none of you listen to Dad.”

“You know full well that I don’t,” Klaus says, as if offended by the suggestion.

“You want to put the kid with the ill-defined and definitively volatile power set,” clarifies Five, “in a high-stress situation.”

“Well, not a real one,” he defends. “Just, you know. Perceived threats. Something to trick the monkey brain into making with the supernatural business.” He waggles his fingers in a visual approximation of said business.

“That might work,” Luther says slowly. “It did for us.” When Klaus purses his lips, he amends, “For several of us, anyway.”

“Or it might hurt her,” Five says irritably. “Anyone thinking about that? How about another one: it might hurt anybody. Anybody! Or anything! If her powers are per se unpredictable—”

“Yeah, but it’s still Vanya. She won’t hurt us. And the rest of us are superheroes, too, remember?”

“I’m not saying she’d try to, but in a situation where she’s not in total control—”

“Is that how you did it?” Vanya asks Luther.

He turns, startled. Most of them are. It’s been a while since she’s spoken. “How I did . . . ?”

“Is that how you got better at controlling yourself?” She knits her fingers tight enough to form laced tourniquets about her knuckles. “You don’t break faucets anymore.”

“I mean. Part of it was, yeah.” He scratches the back of his neck, suddenly hesitant. “But it wasn’t like that was everything, right? Dad gave me a lot of advice, and I had these books on physical therapy and strength training, and I had to work really hard for a long time—”

“And his power is _lifting things,”_  Five says, with emphasis. “And we have zero evidence that your powers obey the same rules, or are even mildly comparable in terms of scope and range.”

“I don’t have any books,” Vanya snaps, and he shuts up fast. “And Dad’s not going to help me, so I—” She stands up quickly, face heated. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she says quietly.

Five scrubs a hand over his mouth. Luther sucks a sharp breath through his teeth, as if wounded.

“I guess that’s it then,” he says. Then: “So what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what all my powers can do, so I don’t know what would bring them out.”

“We could always try sparring,” Luther suggests.

“Yes, Luther,” Five says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Because the perfect introduction to training is a battle royale with her six siblings. Bravo. You have a promising career in education.”

“I’m just tossing out ideas!”

“Focus on what she can do,” Allison says, nudging Vanya’s knee with her own. “Let’s build on what we know. How do you test — say, flight, for example?”

Klaus sits up. “Well,” he says thoughtfully. “I have one idea.”

 

* * *

 

“On second thought,” Vanya shouts over the wind, “I think I’m okay. You know what, you guys are already really good at the superhero thing on your own, I don’t know if I’m necessarily—”

“We’re already up here,” Klaus shouts back, planting his hands on his hips. He stands mere inches from the edge of the roof, which dives into a steep four-story drop to the unforgiving pavement of the courtyard below. Luther and Diego have dragged an inflatable mattress and at least a metric ton of pillows to cover the ground beneath the eave, and both wait for her, tiny figures dotting the ground below. Five sits with his legs crossed casually on the edge of the roof, slurping a milkshake.

Allison squeezes Vanya’s hand. “You’re fine,” she says. “You already did it once.”

“Not like this!”

“Well, no. But the principle is the same, really,” she encourages.

“What if you just rumored me again.”

“Not doing that.”

“You could make me forget everything about this. Allison.”

“Nope.”

“What’s the point of having powers if you won’t help your sister.”

“That’s not helping.”

“How would you know. You tried to rumor me into forgetting I had powers—”

“Oh, okay, so we’re back to that—”

“—I don’t know, seems like you owe me one, Allison, just saying—”

“I’m Switzerland in this,” Five declares, poking around in his milkshake for a maraschino cherry, “but if I had to take a side, I would note that we made Ben climb all the way up here for moral support, and it seems wrong to do that for nothing.”

Ben makes an affirming kind of whimper from where he has latched on to the chimney.

“Listen,” Allison says soothingly, rubbing Vanya’s shoulder with her free hand. “We’ve got a mattress down if it doesn’t work, and if for some reason you miss the mattress Luther can catch you—”

“At which point the impact will probably shatter his spine, given the distance,” Five says indifferently.

“Shut _up,_  Five — and before any of that happens, _Edmund_  here will be able to zip down and get you before you can even fall that far,” Allison says brightly. “So there’s basically nothing to worry about.”

“Except gravity,” Vanya says tightly.

“And broken bones,” Five adds.

“And vertigo.”

“Head trauma.”

“Lacerations.”

“Dislocated vertebrae.”

“Pelvic fractures.”

“Ooh, I hadn’t thought of that one.”

“Really? I’ve been thinking about it ever since we got up here.”

“You’re both awful,” Allison announces. “Five, shut up. Vanya! You’ll be fine! You’re basically safe no matter what.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Do you promise.”

“Yes,” Allison says, a little less certainly.

“You sounded less confident on that one.”

“Oh my God, just _go.”_  Allison lets go of her hand and gives her an encouraging little shove towards the edge. “We know you can do it! It’s just a matter of . . . discipline. Or inspiration. Or something. Probably. Whatever it is, we’ll find out when you jump!”

“You still don’t sound sure.”

“Let the record show that I was against this the whole time,” Five says mildly.

“Can I get some of that milkshake?” Klaus asks. “I left mine downstairs.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“What if I give you ten dollars?”

“You don’t have ten dollars.”

Vanya takes a deep breath and inches towards the edge until her toes just peek over the lip. Diego waves cheerily from the ground, and the corner of her mouth tugs, rebelling against her otherwise grim pall. When an upsurge of wind ruffles her blazer, she can almost push it aside. She tries to recall the feeling that subsumed her in the ballroom, with the sunlight and the music and the dancing, the bubbly floating sensation that bore her up. But it’s so hard to reach, up here, with no music, less dancing, and not much sunlight to come by, either. The sky sports very little of blue.

“Do you want to go back in?” Five inquires. He is, as ever, nonchalant.

“No,” she says. An iron bar of stubbornness asserts itself in her spine. She tilts her head back to the clouds, leans forward, and keels off the side of the building.

Distantly, Allison cheers. Wind tears at Vanya’s clothes, tangles her hair in her eyes. Her stomach drops out of her abdomen; her pulse drops a beat. The stubbornness vanishes about halfway to the ground. Then she starts screaming.

Blue light flickers in and out of her periphery, and then there’s a twist in her gut, and she’s standing back on the roof. She sits down quickly, shuddering.

Five lets her go and strolls back to his milkshake. “Well,” he declares, “that didn’t work.”

“It’s her first try,” Allison argues. “Nobody gets it on their first try.”

“I did.”

“Not true,” Klaus says. “You teleported into a wall when you were six.”

Five’s cheeks redden. He turns his back on Klaus.

“I don’t want to do that again,” Vanya says weakly, edging away from the drop.

“You’re still getting the hang of it! It’ll be better the second time. It always is.” Allison grabs her hand. “Ready?”

“No.”

“Great! Ready down there?”

Luther flashes a thumbs-up.

“Okay!” Allison squeezes and then lets her go. “On my mark. One — two—”

Vanya sucks in a breath and jumps again.

Allison’s not wrong. It does get better, a little bit, insofar as jumping off buildings can ever get all that much better with experience. She’s not so shocked by the sudden rush of windspeed, or the way the ground comes shooting up so much quicker than she’d expected. When she clamps down her jaw, she can swallow the scream before it bursts out of her throat, except then she remembers that rigidity increases the chance of broken bones, so she forces herself to relax, and in the middle of preparing to hit the ground she forgets she’s supposed to be trying to fly. In her defense, it’s hard to think clearly when she’s falling headfirst towards concrete.

Five’s hand closes around her ankle when she’s a story up from the ground, and with another little flinch in the space-time continuum, she’s back beside Allison.

“Well,” Allison says brightly, “that was better, wasn’t it? You looked like you were doing a lot better!”

“I looked like a dead bird,” Vanya says, sitting down hard. “But less graceful.”

“Now, that’s not true. You’re much louder than a dead bird.”

“Thanks, Klaus.”

“I feel like there’s something we’re not getting.” Allison starts to pace in what little space the roof offers them. “Maybe there’s a trigger for it, like mine.”

“We could get the record player up here,” Klaus suggests. He stole Five’s milkshake while the latter was rescuing Vanya, and takes a deliberately obnoxious slurp of it when Five notices. “Dance a little bit, see if that helps.”

“Why would the trigger be dancing?”

“I dunno. Why’s yours connected to rumors? Why’s Diego only able to toss things with pointy ends? Dancing makes as much sense as anything else.”

“I don’t think it’s dancing,” Vanya volunteers.

“Damn. Would’ve been cool.”

“And it’s definitely not at-will,” Allison says, running one hand through her hair. “Have we established that? That Vanya can’t do it on command, like Luther, or F—Edmund?”

“I don’t think Luther does it on command so much as he can’t turn it off,” Five remarks. “You can’t deactivate a muscle.”

“You could cut off blood flow,” Vanya points out.

“Well, not unless — huh,” Five says thoughtfully. “That’s right. You know, that’d be an interesting experiment.”

“We could ask Luther. I doubt he’ll let us try.”

“Who said anything about letting us?”

“It’s hard to imagine a more threatening combination of words,” Klaus muses, “but you know, I’m sure Five won’t turn out to be a supervillain or anything. I mean Ed, sorry.”

“I refuse to answer to Ed.”

“Focus,” Allison says. “Vanya’s powers. Flight. Triggers. Stay on task.”

“Right. Yes. Sorry, Allie.” To Five, he stage whispers, “But seriously, if you do end up going evil—”

“Klaus.”

“Sorry, sorry. Vanya. Powers. Flight. Dancing. Yes.” He claps his hands. “What haven’t we tried? Vanya, can you remember what started any of it?”

Vanya scoots away from the edge of the roof and folds her legs. “Not very well.” She fidgets with her tie. “I didn’t realize I was doing it. I just felt . . . I don’t know. Light? As if it was easier to move, all of a sudden.”

“And . . . ?”

“And it was sunny? And there was music, and I was happy, and — I don’t remember anything special about it.” She pauses. “Except that I was happy, I guess.”

 

* * *

 

When the garage door opens, they’re already in bed. Or at least, Vanya is. 

She buries herself underneath the blanket as the front door creaks. Holds still as stone when the staircase creaks under the weight of a polished oxford, and fails to breathe when long, heavy footsteps beat the hallway outside her bedroom door. Her heart itself stills when the footsteps pause outside her door. She screws her eyes shut and forces her sides to rise and fall in the long, even breaths characteristic of sleep.

After an eternity, her father keeps walking. His bedroom door opens and shuts, and then her muscles unknot.

She peels back her blankets and slides her legs out of bed. Her toes meet the floor. She can feel the vibrations of the hallway outside under her feet — the slight tremor of Grace, still puttering around in her corner, and Pogo coming up from the garage after putting away the car. She waits for a full minute, until she’s sure that none are getting closer to her.

Her lantern flickers slightly when she turns it on. Her windows cast a wide-eyed reflection back at her.

She thinks often of the night when everyone slept in Five’s bed together. Knitted up with a tangle of warm limbs, perpetually reminded of the others’ presence by the odd snort or snore or slight stirring. Someone’s head on her stomach, her head on someone’s else’s leg. Waking up early, when dawn first broke, and lying for an hour without moving. It had been the best sleep she ever had.

Vanya can tell early on in the night when she’s not going to get any sleep. For no particular reason, this is one of those nights. It’s hard to say why. Sometimes her mind starts running and it refuses to stop, speeding along like a wheel down an endless hill, rolling and rolling and rolling, only gaining velocity with time. Her brain is a perpetual motion machine. Dad used to tell her that her medication would help with that, but it hadn’t. Her medication hadn’t helped with anything that needed helping, although God knows she’d hoped it would. Sometimes she thinks about starting the pills back up again, just for the placebo.

She takes the orange pill bottle from her bedside table and taps out one, two, into her hand. Then she drops them on the ground and grinds them under her foot, brushing the dust under her nightstand, until the only sign that they ever existed is a trace of white between the floorboards. She’ll vacuum that in the morning.

Vanya wishes Dad would take her to a real psychiatrist. Medicine that wouldn’t mess with her powers would be nice. Not that she could really explain her situation to any psychiatrist, so it might be a moot point, but still. It’d be nice to see him try.

She massages a knot in the back of her neck, grimacing. There’s still tension written up and down the muscles of her back, and she tips her head back. How do people relax? Didn’t Klaus say something about a hot bath, once? Not much hope of that now. Luther likes music, but she can’t put any on without waking up half the house. She settles for imagining it. She relies on her imagination for a lot of things.

That afternoon had been good. Synths and piano. A brisk, drumming beat. The taste of sugar and cherries on her tongue. She idly taps her foot.

Sunlight. The record player. Movement. Lightness. Echoes. The others, laughing. Vanya laughing, too.

Her heels rise ever so slightly off the ground. A tremulous airiness seeps into her limbs, like the delicate suspension of a piano trill, light as bubbles. She screws her eyes shut and concentrates. The feeling of her skirt twirling as she spun. Record player scratches. The sound of Allison giggling, the snort that she always tries to muffle because she doesn’t think it’s ladylike, but when she’s really laughing she can’t help herself. Maraschino cherries.

Vanya floats.

When she opens her eyes, her pajamas billow with an invisible breeze. Her legs kick gently in midair, and she bobs like someone suspended in water. A gasp stumbles out of her, and she claps her hand over her mouth, heart skittering. Her altitude sinks. She hastily shuts her eyes and concentrates: synths and violins and Klaus dropping Allison when he tried to dip her, Ben smiling underneath his scruffy row of bangs, Luther flailing like he didn’t know what to do with his arms while he danced. She rises.

Delight warms her stomach like she’s swallowed concentrated sunlight. Restraining a whoop of glee, she plants one foot on the wall and pushes off, turning slow backflips in midair, her chest straining under the pressure of not laughing. Her momentum carries her to bounce gently from the opposite wall, and she glides along the ceiling, skimming one palm against the old plaster. Her head knocks against the window and she giggles, angling to hover above her bed. 

The world turns end over end as she rotates gently. She feels good. She feels better than good. She feels in control. She wants to fly through the halls of the house and shriek and tell everybody, but — tomorrow. For now, this is something for her.

She presses her nose to the window, upside-down, and grins at her reflection in the glass. Nestled in a bed of clouds, the moon grins back at her. She imagines it growing and swelling, pushing back the shadows in her room, turning the midnight sky to blue.


End file.
